Evening fell. This could be seen easily through the glass greenhouse windows. Now certainty had been established.” ...

A saggy, older, deflated appearance is characteristic of the emaciation now known in Hollywood as “Ozempic face,” named after the prescription weight-loss drug that’s overprescribed in Los Angeles.

October 31, 2025 – "That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small ...

A crate full of chain falls got delivered. It was a glorious crate, made of sanded spruce. I unscrewed some of the planking ...

Jan Kerouac’s darker and more extreme brand of mischief make her father’s On the Road high jinks seem tame and even a tad ...

Five weeks after Fort Sumter, the official starting point of the war, Ellsworth’s Fire Zouaves received the command to sail ...

For a long time, Edward P. Jones has been one of the two or three writers most important to me. When I teach his stories, ...

My garden thrums with bird calls. Canada goose and American robin, mourning dove, northern cardinal. Ruby-throated hummingbirds! A hawk’s claws clench the golden cross on the steeple; the hawk kills a ...

Marguerite Duras’s Le navire Night (The ship named Night) is both a film and a would-be film, or rather a documentary of a film that the writer decided never to finish. Duras abandoned her initial ...

Everybody likes ghazals. Or they do when they learn what they are: A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere. It is a medieval thing—or what ...

In December 1903, Thomas Mann wrote his older brother, Heinrich, a long letter reviewing the latter’s novel—with brutal candor. Some of the most scathing bits are below. The complete missive is in The ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...